Emily Dickinson Reading Circle November 2017

Emily Dickinson Reading Circle November 2017

Facilitated by Margaret Freeman

Dickinson's prosodic effects, especially how meter and rhythm affect us as we read aloud.

Margaret F. The poem I’d like to look at is Franklin 688, and Johnson 622. Now, the interesting thing about this poem – it’s very unusual for Dickinson, because it starts in iambic pentameter. You do get iambic pentameter in Dickinson. She’s usually playing with it.

 To know just how He suffered - would be dear;-

 To know if any Human eyes were near

 To whom He could entrust His wavering gaze, -

 Until it settled broad - on Paradise -

 To know if He was patient - part content -

 Was Dying as He thought - or different;

 Was it a pleasant Day to die -

 And did the Sunshine face His way -

 What was His furthest mind - Of Home - or God,

 Or what the Distant say -

 At news that He ceased Human Nature

 Such a day -

 And Wishes - Had He Any -

 Just His Sigh - Accented -

 Had been legible - to Me -.

 And was He Confident until

 Ill fluttered out - in Everlasting Well?

 And if He spoke - What name was Best -

 What last

 What one Broke off with

 At the drowsiest -

 Was He afraid - or tranquil -

 Might He know

 How Conscious Consciousness - could grow,

 Till Love that was - and Love too blest to be -

 Meet - and the Junction be Eternity -
                                  - J622/Fr688/M333

So what’s going on in this poem? If you notice the first six lines, all are iambic pentameter, and the last three are. So, you’ve got six and three, and it frames the poem. What is in the middle?

Barbara. She’s pausing, and in pausing Dickinson really wants you to take in what she’s saying. Instead of going like sing-song.

Leslie. Exactly.

Margaret F. Well actually, in the hymn instructions for singing, there was the attention drawn by the pauses, right? To create the attention – stop – in exactly that kind of way. Note that, in the actual content of the lines, between the six lines and the three lines are questions.

Wendy. And speculation.

Margaret F. Questions and speculation, yeah, all about this person. Was dying as he thought or was it different. Was it a pleasant day to die, and suddenly, you’re in a different stress.

Margaret M. But just the sound of the first line, To know just how he suffered – would be dear

Margaret F. It doesn’t sound like iambic pentameter, does it?

Margaret M. The meter is not what I’m talking about; it’s the sense of what she’s saying.

Alice. Dear – expensive.

Margaret M. Expensive, but it has all of these connotations, and to me it’s just slightly – off – of conventional attitude.

Margaret F. Yes, but you see, it’s also off in the sound.

Lois. When you read the first line, where did you put the emphasis?

Margaret F. To KNOW just how he SUFfered would be DEAR. Three stresses.

Lois. So you put the stresses on suffered and dear and know.. I think she would have put the emphasis on how.

Margaret F. Oh yes. That falls on a stress position.

Lois. To know just HOW he suffered would be dear.

Margaret F. Yes, exactly. Then you get your four. But then you’ve got that possibility – how you’re feeling the rhythm, right? You’re creating the rhythm as you go along, and different people will see that rhythm differently, and that’s what you’re doing, Lois, but the fact that you’re focusing on the how just changes everything, and it’s better than my reading because it introduces the rest of the questions and speculation.

Lois. Well, it personalizes it. She’s got another poem where someone is dying, and it’s heartbreaking. It’s about how awful it is because she’s not there, for me to get there after he diesis as worthless as next morning’s sun. And she’s kind of dealing with the same thing. To me, in that poem, it’s more poignant because you can just feel the anguish. There’s a line where she says, “He’s looking for my tardy eyes.” I think that’s right. But in this poem it’s more – what? – generalized?

Margaret F. Yeah, but you’re focusing on content, Lois.

Lois. I know, I know, I know.

Margaret F. The important thing is, it’s all very well to say “this is the content,” and “this is the meaning” and this is the paraphrase,” but it’s exactly the way the sounds and the rhythm are operating with those words that is creating the affect, I think, that you’re finding.

Lois. Well, I thought you said something early on about imagining how Dickinson would read it.

Margaret F. I think that was Margaret who said that. I don’t think I would ever say that [laughing].

Lois. Well I think that’s a fascinating project, to try to imagine how she would read it.

Margaret F. Well, Masako Takeda, whom a lot of you know, is always asking the question, “Is it Dickinsonian.” What is Dickinsonian about Dickinson?

Margaret M. Well, the thing about her originality is that the sound of every single one of her poems is so different. I think that even Gerard Manly Hopkins poems sound more like on another, in terms of their rhythms, than her poems do. If you really, really listen to her poems, rather than put them in a metric, but just try to figure out how she would say them – imagine! – I’m sure that she would do it in a very unusual way.

Connie. Well, this is just a roll of questions. What would happen if this and this and this, all questions all the way down.

Margaret M. Isn’t she trying to identify with the dying Christ? And, she makes it so immediate with the questions that she asks.

Connie. Was he afraid, or tranquil?

Margaret M. Yeah! What was he looking at? What was he thinking about? And, I love that of home, or God – of where he has been or where he was going. And, I just think she would read this in a very gentle voice.

Mary Clare. How would she read that central part, after the first six and the last three, where all those dashed are, and the lines are very differently linked. How do you think, Margaret, she would read that?

Margaret M. Like What was his furthest mind?

Mary Clare. Was it a pleasant day to die? It starts there, I think, the little short lines.

Alice. I hear threes, right from the beginning. I read the first line as seven plus three, rather than of ten [syllables]. So, I hear the threes all the way through. Every time it gets to one of those three lines, it’s like it’s coming to fruition at that point.

Margaret M. And I think that by going from the longer lines to the shorter lines is a course of emotion – her emotion building, which is something that I think she does with her dashes. Her poems are not a complete thought that she’s thought all out. She’s creating them as you read them. And I think there’s a greater intensity in those shorter questions.

Alice. I think it’s awfully lucky that we don’t have a record of her reading. [laughter]

Margaret M. I think she would read them differently each time we asked her.

Alice. I think she’d read them differently every single time. I think that’s characteristic of a great poem, they don’t just fall into one way of reading them.

Margaret M. So, you think if we heard a recording of her reading –

Alice. We’d be disappointed. [laughter]

Margaret M. Or, we’d say “Oh, that’s got to be it.” But, if we had her come every meeting – [laughter]

Margaret F. We have to remember that not every poet is good at reading their own poetry.

Greg. She said that she read Shakespeare in the attic and the rafters wept.

Margaret F. Yes, but was that because she read it badly? [laughter]

Alice. I think it’s not a good question, because it’s so speculative. There’s so much that is factual that we can really build on.

Margaret M. Well for me, when I read the poems and try to figure them out, I try to read them as I imagine she would read them, and that’s not pinning her down, that’s just my imagination, and I think that your imagination is the best tool you have for understanding any work of art.

Margaret F. And that’s the secret, Margaret; you have to understand it in order to really get the rhythm, which is why Lois’ reading of those lines is better than mine. because she was understanding it in that kind of way. I looked up Lois’ poem; it’s Franklin 234, and Johnson is 205.

Lois reads:

I should not dare to leave my friend,

Because—because if he should die

While I was gone—and I—too late—

Should reach the Heart that wanted me—

If I should disappoint the eyes

That hunted—hunted so—to see—

And could not bear to shut until

They "noticed" me—they noticed me—

If I should stab the patient faith

So sure I'd come—so sure I'd come—

It listening—listening—went to sleep—

Telling my tardy name—

My Heart would wish it broke before—

Since breaking then—since breaking then—

Were useless as next morning's sun—

Where midnight frosts—had lain!
                               - J205/Fr234/M114

[The way she repeats the words] it’s almost like sobbing. It’s like when you’re crying, you can’t keep going.

Margaret M. But this is something she’s making up. It’s a hypothetical. She’s even making this situation up that she’s so sad about. [laughter]

Lois. Well, maybe. [laughter]

Margaret M. We all imagine not being there when someone that we love is dying. We’d like to see it. It’s not neurotic or anything.

Lois. It would make you neurotic to feel that and not make a poem [laughter].

Margaret F. But you can see how the pauses there are really reinforcing the tension; real focus –

Margaret M. - and the repetitions, too. And, it’s a poem about not getting there. She’s not getting there with all these repetitions; she’s staggering, or stalling.

Margaret F. I’m not sure I altogether like the way the poem ends, because, My Heart would wish it broke before sounds to me incredibly sentimental.

Alice. The broken heart itself sounds sentimental, but that’s from over-use.

Lois. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a hypothetical. If you’re looking after somebody that’s sick, and you’re torn between staying and doing something else, it’s like one big guilt trip on yourself. If I leave and he dies, here’s the scenario. So, it could be something that’s playing in someone’s mind who’s caring for someone who’s sick.

[first and second poems compared. semi-audible]

Margaret M. The first poem that we looked at is simply on a more august theme.

Margaret F. But rhythmically I think it’s doing some very interesting things. There’s more involved in moving with it, going along with the questions.

Lois. It’s certainly less emotional.

Margaret F. Is it? I mean, when I got to those last lines, How conscious consciousness could grow, I literally had shivers. I felt that with this poem, and I didn’t feel it with the other poem at all.

Connie. That is an acid test.

Margaret F. And I wonder, what is the difference?

Sandy. Was it because of the broken heart syndrome?

Margaret F. It might be, but –

Sandy. But was it sentimental from her point, in that era? Had it already become over-used?

Margaret F. It might be, but it sounds like Lois’ poem is in 8 basically, except for Telling my tardy name [inaudible] Oh, that raises the other question, Margaret, about the line breaks and the stanza breaks, and how they affect the way that we move through the poem/

Margaret M. Am I right in assuming that the stanza breaks that we have in our text are probably not the ones that she had. Would that be generally true, from your reading of her manuscripts?

Margaret F. That’s why I use the three volume variorum edition.

Margaret M. I know about the line breaks, but I wonder about the stanza breaks.

Margaret F. Usually they’re right, in the edited versions, but occasionally there’s a question. If they’re really close in the manuscript, is there a break there, or not?

Greg. There are some poems where there’s more than one manuscript, and one version has stanza breaks and the other doesn’t.

Margaret F. That’s right, Greg, different copies will be different, and that’s true for the line breaks as well as the stanza breaks. [crosstalk] You’re saying, she had those one-word lines a lot. It really would help to have it printed out the way she wrote it.

Lois. I think Chris’ book [Christanne Miller, Emily Dickinson’s Poems as She Preserved Them] sticks with the manuscripts.

Margaret F. No. She comments on them, but her actual poetry still conforms to the editors.

Lois. Well, in To know just how he suffered, the first stanza is four, the second stanza is four …

Margaret F. Yeah, but she has an incredible lot of line breaks not reflected in the reading edition. I should not dare to leave,  “my friend” is on a different line. Because—because if he should, “die” is on a different line

Margaret M. By itself?

Margaret F. Yeah.

Alice. She’s sitting at that little tiny table, and she’s using little tiny pieces of paper.

Margaret F. If she’d wanted to, she could have compressed it into one line. You’ve got examples where, when she wanted it on one line, she’d put it on one line. I think some of them are run-overs, but you’ve also got to think not the size of the paper, but her developing graphology. Her handwriting changed, dramatically, over the period of her life, and I worked with a professional graphologist on Dickinson, and the fact that she was spacing so much at the end was in indication [crosstalk]. Yes, the spaces between the words, which of course then would create those run-overs. But I find, if you pay attention to the line breads – which is why I always recommend that people read it the way Dickinson actually wrote it. then you can decide, a reader, whether you want to read it as a run-over or whether you want to read it as a separate – and what is the reason that that had on the way that you are experiencing the feeling of the poem.

Margaret M. But even if you have – when you are reading aloud to yourself, you can keep doing that; you can keep experimenting with it that way. And, if you keep reading the poems several times, you’ll find that you will do that; you’ll start emphasizing certain words. That’s why I think it’s so important to read them aloud, for the sound of them – to get the sense. It seems to me to be the easiest way.

Alice. It’s certainly one way to begin. One of the things that I do is read it as if I were a young person, or a workman , or a minister, or the king, or the maid. Every voice that you read it in sounds different, and it’s constantly changing. The definition of a bad poem might be exactly what is on the page; it doesn’t ever shift, so that you have all of these possibilities. So it’s never just me that’s reading, I’m always somebody else as I’m reading it, imagining how it would sound from this viewpoint. When I finally can settle on one, it’s because I’ve found one that I can really identify with. I can say “This feels right,” which means that you’ve then set up a whole character reading the poem, which means that you have a mood, a quality tone of voice, and all of those things established, which makes the song fit together

Margaret F. Do you find that particularly true for Dickinson, or in general?

Alice, Oh yes. I have to find a voice in any poem.

Greg. A woman spoke to us at the museum several years ago. She helped abused women and she used Dickinson poems as part of that. One the poems was I’m Nobody, and she said the women read the poem as I’m Nobody – Who are you? [This in a wounded, pugnacious tone]

Margaret F. Well, Dickinson can have so many voices, right? And so many characters herself.

Margaret M. You can keep reading them your whole life and they always sound new.

Margaret F. Is that true? We have poets in this room; I want to know how all of you feel about this. [crosstalk].

Mary Clare. I can write something, then come back to it the next day and it’s a whole new poem. That’s part of the mystery of poetry.

Greg. One poet said – I forget who it was – when I write the poem, I hear it in my own voice, but after I’ve written it, it’s not mine anymore.

Margaret. Yes, T S Eliot said something along those lines. When I write a poem, I write it as a poet, but once I’ve written it, I can only read it as a reader. I’m no longer the poet, I’m the reader.

Connie. Hm. That’s very interesting.

Margaret M. But if you think of them as a song that a singer will sing over and over and over again, it makes sense.

Alice. There’s no way that any singer can sing it exactly the same way twice. It changes every time.

Margaret M. And if they could, they’d get bored with their job.

Margaret F. Like teaching – the same thing over and over again. You never do that, right?

Alice. It’s a false impression – “this is it.” So, it has to be a spoken art. There’s no way to notate it.

Margaret M. You know, if we thought that 205 was too sentimental, I wonder if the reason we don’t find 622 as sentimental is because it’s not about the speaker of the poem so much, as about something she’s thinking about, and those last lines – the last stanza - Was he afraid, or tranquil/? Might he know/ [pause] How conscious [pause] consciousness could grow – that’s like her going out to the circumference. Till love that was, and love too blest to be,/ Meet—and the junction be Eternity.

Alice. She’s written that same thought over and over again. [inaudible]

Greg. I could imagine myself expressing something like the sentiment in the earlier poem, but in the later one, she’s beyond me.

Margaret M. Right.

Lynn. That’s what I’m thinking, too, yeah.

Margaret. I think there’s also a recognition in a poem that there’s always something beyond, the poem introduces you to, and that to me is part of the evaluative aspect of the poem. If it doesn’t do that, I think it’s not quite working the way poetry works. There has to be always that reaching out to something beyond, and it can be something that’s undefinable, right? And so, as you’re reading, you’re reaching that in different ways – in different days, in different characters …

Margaret. And I think some poems appeal to us because we think, “Ah, I know she means there,” you know, and other times we think, “God, I never thought of that!” How conscious consciousness could grow! I really never did think of that - how consciousness could intensify. But, it is a wonderful way to think of the moment of death – to speak of dying.

Lois. I love that phrase, love too blest to be.

Margaret F. I came across a paper a colleague gave me. It’s an interpretation of rhythm. I’d like to read a couple of lines to you, because he analyzes two Swedish poems, and it’s absolutely incredible, his analysis, in terms of the rhythmic movements of these poems. So here’s his introduction. He makes three assumptions about reading poetry. That it’s a temporal activity, that you look upon reading as a co-operation or a meeting between patterns of the text and the preceding subject, and that that doesn’t happen arbitrarily, but according to certain principals. He said that if we then agree to these three assumptions, we must also assume, I think, that this structuring, ordering, rhythmasizing activity is a meaningful activity, that there is some kind of game involved for the reader, that we do not have to rhythmatize the text, but that we want to. To interpret rhythm would then amount to answering the question of why we want to rhythmatize. In other words, not just describing, but wondering about the functions and affects of rhythm. Apart from the fact that it’s good mental economy perceptually and conceptually comfortable to experience rhythm, that is, experiencing a flow of changing images in stead of an unbroken stream, it is also quite reasonable to assume that there must be some cognitive intellectual and/or emotional meaning to the experience of rhythmical patterns.

Alice. So you don’t get if from just doing syllables, tra-la-la, tra-la-la.

Margaret F. Exactly, exactly.

Lois. If the words are hard, let the rhythm be sweet.

Margaret F. Well, I thought we could look at another really long poem. It’s Franklin 757; In Johnson it’s 646. Is anyone familiar with this poem that would like to read it?

Greg. I am. Greg reads.

I think to Live — may be a Bliss

To those who dare to try —

Beyond my limit to conceive —

My lip — to testify —

I think the Heart I former wore

Could widen — till to me

The Other, like the little Bank

Appear — unto the Sea —

I think the Days — could every one

In Ordination stand —

And Majesty — be easier —

Than an inferior kind —

No numb alarm — lest Difference come —

No Goblin — on the Bloom —

No start in Apprehension's Ear,

No Bankruptcy — no Doom —

But Certainties of Sun —

Midsummer — in the Mind —

A steadfast South — upon the Soul —

Her Polar time — behind —

The Vision — pondered long —

So plausible becomes

That I esteem the fiction — real —

The Real — fictitious seems —

How bountiful the Dream —

What Plenty — it would be —

Had all my Life but been Mistake

Just rectified — in Thee
                            - J646/Fr757/M350

[To hear Greg read this poem aloud, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGDIfjQoY04]

Jeff. That’s a reading by someone who knows the poem and knows how to read it.

Greg. That’s a reading by someone who knows what that feels like, too.

Mary Clare. That in Thee at the end, though, that just irritates me. I don’t want it to be there. I don’t want it to be outwardly attributed to some other entity.

Alice. But it could be God.

Mary Clare. I know it could be, but it’s irritating. She’s such a rich life, you know?

Lois. It could also be poetry. I think of it as poetry.

Greg. I bet you don’t like the Master Letters either, Mary Clare.

Mary Clare, No, I don’t. [laughter]

Margaret F. OK, listen to the final stanza, somewhat differently.

How bountiful the Dream —

What Plenty — it would be —

Had all my Life but been Mistake

Just rectified

Connie. It sounds like she had a terrible life.

Barbara. Well, she wasn’t listening to Mary Clare [laughter].

Alice. I see the whole thing as this vision, and it’s grounded exactly like an electrical grounding, in those last two words. It’s personalized.

Margaret F. What I find is that what’s going on in this poem is in the movement of the poem. I think to Live — may be a Bliss – it’s all counterfactual. It’s saying that I’m not. I don’t know how to live.

Margaret M. Well, a little bit of biography here. She was not willing to accept Christ as her savior. She was not willing to go up in front of Church and say “I’m born again.” Is that what this is about?

Mary Clare. Oh, that’s terrible, I hope it’s not about that. [laughter]

Greg. To me, the voice sounds excited. It’s almost like she’s enjoying the counterfactual as much as the factual for a while there.

Margaret F . I notice that the first three stanzas start with I think. The you get the negatives, No, No, No, No, But. So the poem is actually moving from what she’s imagining that she doesn’t have, to what she does have, which is the reversal of the negative. She has a numb alarm, she has a Goblin on the Bloom. We know that from other poems, right? But Certainties of Sun, she’s changing it to actually making it real.

Margaret. That’s why I think Lois might be right, that it’s poetry she’s talking about – her life in poetry – which was different. Her imaginative life was very different from her daily life.

Melba. Coming at it from a point of view of meter, I think it’s interesting. This is almost perfect common meter, and while I could read it comfortably and leave off the last two words, in Thee, I can’t imagine someone steeped in the hymns of the nineteenth century that could stop after rectified without [thumps twice on table]. [laughter] FINISH! PLEASE! It’s just the regularity of this, which is kind of unusual for Dickinson, demands something in that last place.

Margaret F. And actually, it’s the expectation that creates that rhythmic grouping isn’t it? You expect closure.

Jeff. She could have made her meter by saying “just rectified like this,” but she didn’t. [general agreement] It’s deliberate.

Melba. I think this is a classic hymn movement, to just sort of survey the current plight, then move to the vision of the future which in a weird way is here now, through God’s presence and love. That seems to be a really consistent movement, for hymn.

‘’’’’’’’

Margaret M. 1068 in Franklin and 949 in Johnson. Under the Light, yet under. And actually, it’s the last poem that I ended with on balanced meters.

Under the Light, yet under,

Under the Grass and the Dirt,

Under the Beetle's Cellar

Under the Clover's Root,

Further than Arm could stretch

Were it Giant long,

Further than Sunshine could

Were the Day Year long,

Over the Light, yet over,

Over the Arc of the Bird—

Over the Comet's chimney—

Over the Cubit's Head,

Further than Guess can gallop

Further than Riddle ride—

Oh for a Disc to the Distance

Between Ourselves and the Dead!
                            - J949/Fr1068/M478

It’s very interesting. Just to give you an idea of why I thought about this poem, I started out my paper on Emily Dickinson’s balanced meter by saying, “Let me start by anticipating  a did you know question, that anyone giving a paper on Dickinson almost invariably will be asked, by saying ‘Yes, I did know that her poems cold be set to The Yellow Rose of Texas.’ However I hope that this paper will lay that comment once and for all to rest by saying that such a practice would destroy everything the poems were doing. “ At the meeting the year before, on cognitive metaphor, someone from the audience asked whether metaphoric projection is understood by the theory of cognitive metaphor, but only in the semantic domain. In other words, metaphor making meaning. Everyone talks about metaphor in terms of what it means. “Juliet is the Sun” – what does that mean? Mark Johnson, who wrote a wonderful book called The Body and the Mind – he’s a cognitive philosopher at the University of Oregon – in response to that question, which was addressed to him, he asked me to read a Dickinson poem, notably for rhythm, and commented that something was going on there which was not simply semantic, and it was this poem. For me, the rhythm of the galloping horse, Under the Light, yet under, Over the Light, yet over – it’s stopped in the stanzas that follow. Further than Arm could stretch – right? She’s trying to get there with the horse, but she’s not going to get there. It’s too far. You’ll never get there – between yourself and the dead. It’s just amazing, isn’t it? That’s a perfect example of how the rhythmic motion that Larsen was talking about in his paper is actually contributing to the understanding of what the poem is doing. So it’s saying, but it’s also experiencing that same thing in that kind of way.

Margaret M. The rhythm acts it out.

Margaret F. Exactly. Or, it creates the meaning.

Margaret M. Well, the words help, too. [laughter]

Margaret F. Yes, but it’s what you bring to the poem. You are creating meaning as you’re reading.

Lois. But, aren’t you saying that the rhythm helps you get there, even if  ….

Margaret M. By acting it out.

Margaret F. Yeah, that’s right, exactly.

Margaret M. It’s not just an intellectual thing, it’s a physical thing.

Sandy. I could see any art form, music, painting, working with this poem.

Greg. Does the alliteration help with that forward momentum as well?

Sandy. She chooses the words very carefully

Alice. The lovely thing about that galloping rhythm is that, to me, it comes with just a total stop at the Oh. [general agreement]